1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to peer-to-peer networking, and more particularly to a peer-to-peer network computing platform.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has three valuable fundamental assets—information, bandwidth, and computing resources—all of which are vastly under utilized, partly due to the traditional client-server computing model. No single search engine or portal can locate and catalog the ever-increasing amount of information on the Web in a timely way. Moreover, a huge amount of information is transient and not subject to capture by techniques such as Web crawling. For example, research has estimated that the world produces two exabytes or about 2×1018 bytes of information every year, but only publishes about 300 terabytes or about 3×1012 bytes. In other words, for every megabyte of information produced, only one byte gets published. Moreover, Google claims that it searches about only 1.3×10^8 web pages. Thus, finding useful information in real time is increasingly difficult.
Although miles of new fiber have been installed, the new bandwidth gets little use if everyone goes to one site for content and to another site for auctions. Instead, hot spots just get hotter while cold pipes remain cold. This is partly why most people still feel the congestion over the Internet while a single fiber's bandwidth has increased by a factor of 10^6 since 1975, doubling every 16 months.
Finally, new processors and storage devices continue to break records in speed and capacity, supporting more powerful end devices throughout the network. However, computation continues to accumulate around data centers, which have to increase their workloads at a crippling pace, thus putting immense pressure on space and power consumption.
The term peer-to-peer networking may be applied to a wide range of technologies that greatly increase the utilization of information, bandwidth, and computing resources in the Internet. Frequently, these P2P technologies adopt a network-based computing style that neither excludes nor inherently depends on centralized control points. Apart from improving the performance of information discovery, content delivery, and information processing, such a style also can enhance the overall reliability and fault-tolerance of computing systems.
Many peer-to-peer systems are built for delivering a single type of service. For example, Napster provides music file sharing, Gnutella provides generic file sharing, and AIM provides instant messaging. Given the diverse characteristics of these services and the lack of a common underlying P2P infrastructure, each P2P software vendor tends to create incompatible systems—none of them able to interoperate with one another. This means each vendor creates its own P2P user community, duplicating efforts in creating software and system primitives commonly used by all P2P systems. Moreover, for a peer to participate in multiple communities organized by different P2P implementations, the peer must support multiple implementations, each for a distinct P2P system or community, and serve as the aggregation point.
Many P2P systems today offer their features or services through a set of APIs that are delivered on a particular operating system using a specific networking protocol. For example, one system might offer a set of C++ APIs, with the system initially running only on Windows, over TCP/IP, while another system offers a combination and C and Java APIs, running on a variety of UNIX systems, over TCP/IP but also requiring HTTP. A P2P developer is then forced to choose which set of APIs to program to, and consequently, which set of P2P customers to target. Because there is little hope that the two systems will interoperate, if the developer wants to offer the same service to both communities, they have to develop the same service twice for two P2P platforms or develop a bridge system between them. Both approaches are inefficient and impractical considering the dozens of P2P platforms in existence.
Many P2P systems, especially those being offered by upstart companies, tend to choose one operating system as their target deployment platform. The cited reason for this choice is to target the largest installed base and the fastest path to profit. The inevitable result is that many dependencies on platform-specific features are designed into (or just creep into) the system. This is often not the consequence of technical desire but of engineering reality with its tight schedules and limited resources.
This approach is clearly shortsighted. Even though the earliest demonstration of P2P capabilities are on platforms in the middle of the computing hardware spectrum, it is very likely that the greatest proliferation of P2P technology will occur at the two ends of the spectrum—large systems in the enterprise and consumer-oriented small systems. In fact, betting on any particular segment of the hardware or software system is not future proof.
Prior art peer-to-peer systems are generally built for delivering a single type of service, for example a music file sharing service, a generic file sharing service, or an instant messaging service. Given the diverse characteristics of these services and given the lack of a common underlying peer-to-peer infrastructure, each vendor tends to form various peer-to-peer “silos”. In other words, the prior art peer-to-peer systems typically do not interoperate with each other. This means each vendor has to create its own peer-to-peer user community, duplicating efforts in creating primitives commonly used by peer-to-peer systems such as peer discovery and peer communication.
FIGS. 1A and 1B are examples illustrating the peer-to-peer model. FIG. 1A shows two peer devices 104A and 104B that are currently connected. Either of the two peer devices 104 may serve as a client of or a server to the other device. FIG. 1B shows several peer devices 104 connected over the network 106 in a peer group. In the peer group, any of the peer devices 104 may serve as a client of or a server to any of the other devices.